“Begging your pardon, miss.” A girl with a luxuriant coil of hair, wound around her head like a halo, rose to her feet. “But you keep on saying ‘we’ and ‘us.’ It won’t be you who loses your job. You have a nice house uptown to go home to after these meetings. I know you mean well, but you can’t know what it’s like to live in a stinking tenement and never have enough to eat.”
The girl at the top table flushed, then nodded gravely. “You’re right. I can’t know exactly what it’s like for you, but I do have some experience with confronting the enemy when it comes to the suffrage movement. I have been to jail twice, and believe me, I was not treated like a lady there. There are many of us, all of good families, willing to go to jail, to make nuisances of ourselves, if we can obtain the right to vote for our sisters.”
There was scattered applause from the audience. The young woman from uptown bowed her head again. “But I admit that I know I will have a home to go to and food on the table when I am let out of jail. I know you will be asked to make enormous sacrifices, but somebody has to, or nothing will ever improve. Every generation of immigrants who steps off the boat will go into conditions like the ones you are enduring right now.”
“So what can we do?” Rose asked.
“You must recruit members where you work,” Jacob said. “Plant seeds in the minds of your fellow workers that you can change things, that you can make your employers fear you. I know that for many of you the busy season is approaching—the rush to get items into the stores for the holiday shopping and then the new spring lines after the January sales. This is when the shops make their biggest profit. If you walk out now, you will cost them valuable time while they find and train replacements. Maybe they are not so willing to lose that time. Maybe they are willing to negotiate.”
Rose looked at me, her eyes shining. “It might just work, Molly. If we walked out the moment Lowenstein wanted us to start on the new designs, maybe he would listen.”
“It’s worth a try,” I said.
Rose got to her feet. “We are willing to try. Mr. Lowenstein prides himself on getting his garments into the store first. Maybe this will be a way for us to make him listen.”
“Good for you, Rose,” the dark girl at the table said. “Do you have someone to work with you?”
“I have Molly,” Rose said. “She has just arrived from Ireland. Stand up, Molly, and let them see you.”
I rose to my feet.
“Two redheads, oy vay,” someone near me said. “I pity poor Mr. Lowenstein.”
There was good-natured laughter.
The meeting progressed. It was decided that Lowenstein’s should be a test case. We would try to bring all of the girls into the union so that we could conduct an effective walkout the moment the new designs were produced. I knew better than any of them that this might work. Lowenstein counted on getting his stolen designs into the stores before Mostel had his ready. If he couldn’t corner the market first, then he would lose. A good bargaining tool indeed.
When the meeting concluded, refreshments were served—cookies and hot tea and a big plate of sandwiches. The girls fell upon them with gusto. I took a cup of tea, then joined a group of girls.
“So you’re from Ireland, are you, Molly?”
I agreed that I was. “And I understand that there was another Irish girl here not too long ago? Didn’t you say so, Rose? By the name of Kathy?”
“Kathy? But surely she was English,” one of the girls said.
“I thought someone said she was from an upper-class English family, only she lived in Ireland.”
“I don’t think she ever said where she was from, did she?” The girls looked at each other.
“No, very tight-lipped about herself, she was. But outspoken when it came to union matters. You should have heard her talk. My, but she could have talked the hind leg off a donkey.”
“Remember you told her that, Fanny? And she laughed and said something about being good at blarney, whatever that means.”
“Too bad she stopped coming to meetings.”
“So where did she go?” I asked. “Did she move away?”
The girls looked at each other and shrugged.
“I don’t know what happened to her,” one said.
“Which company did she work for?”
Again the girls shrugged. “She only came a few times, then she stopped. Too bad because I’d have loved to hear her tell those bosses what she thought of them. Real haughty she was, and kind of looked down her nose when she spoke to you.”
“Did she have light brown, sort of wispy hair and very light eyes?” I asked.
“Yes, did you know her?”
“I thought she might have been a friend from back home,” I said.
“So you just arrived from Ireland, did you?”
“That’s right.” As I said it, I found myself looking at the upper-crust young lady from the top table. She was standing with a sandwich in her hand, staring hard at me. Then she put down the plate and came straight toward me. “Now I know where I saw you before,” she said coldly. “What exactly are you doing here?”
Fourteen
“What do you mean?” I asked.